


It's A Matter Of Taste

by fhsa_archivist



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode Related, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-07-08
Updated: 2004-07-08
Packaged: 2019-02-05 15:54:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12797709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fhsa_archivist/pseuds/fhsa_archivist
Summary: Alex's explorations into Asian cuisine force Walter to make an important life decision.





	It's A Matter Of Taste

**Author's Note:**

> Note from Haven, the archivist: This story was originally archived at [Fandom Haven Story Archive (FHSA)](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Fandom_Haven_Story_Archive), was scheduled to shut down at the end of 2016. To preserve the archive, I began working with the OTW to transfer the stories to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in November 2017. If you are this creator and the work hasn't transferred to your AO3 account, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Fandom Haven Story Archive collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/fhsa/profile).

Author: D.W. Chong

Title: It's A Matter Of Taste

Rating: PG 

Pairing: Sk/K 

Classification: Homework

Summary: Alex's explorations into Asian cuisine force Walter to make an important life decision.

 

IT'S A MATTER OF TASTE

 

by D.W. Chong

 

###

 

Alex Krycek would eat anything.

 

Experience had taught Walter Skinner the truth of that deceptively innocuous declarative.

 

In the five years Walter had spent in Alex's company, he had watched Alex eat things that made

the contestants on "Fear Factor" look like weak stomached wusses. He had done it without

complaint. Sometimes, he even cracked a smile.

 

Alex had been trained to eat anything. 

 

According to Alex, his 'teachers' had stressed that the ability to eat anything to hand was a

strategic advantage, and essential to his survival --both long term and short-- which, Alex

declared, had proven to be true on too many occasions to count, particularly during his two week

stint in the dreaded silo which gave him nightmares to this day. 

 

Alex had once confided to Walter that the school-masters made every student drink his own urine

every morning. Those not quick enough to comply were forced to drink the urine of every person

on their ward. As there were thirty children in each ward, every one of them learned to comply

very quickly.

 

Only a life-threatening allergy excused a child from eating whatever was on the school's daily

menu, and nobody ever got seconds. 

 

Considering some of the items on the menu, Walter considered this a blessing --not that Alex

agreed. 

 

Due to special circumstances, Alex had spent his entire six years at the 'Academy' on half-rations.

It had given him a willingness to finish whatever was put in front of him, whether he liked it or

not, and a compulsion to do anything --wheedle, barter, steal, or dumpster dive-- to fill his

stomach.

 

Alex Krycek ate haggis. He ate ramp. He ate Vegemite. He ate Limburger cheese. He ate

chitlings. He ate crab brains. He ate blubber. He ate century eggs. He ate duran. He ate live fish,

sea urchins, butter grubs, crickets, and those Guatemalan beetles that --he swore-- tasted like

cinnamon. He ate pease pudding nine days old.

 

He ate shit. 

 

He ate blachen.

 

Actually, Walter, thought, *eating* blachen was not all *that* bad. It was a condiment; shrimp

paste, to be exact, but a little went a long way. As one flavor among many in some exotic Asian

dish cooked in a restaurant far downwind it was pleasantly pungent. Walter had enjoyed every

dish he'd ever eaten that contained it, whether Thai, Malay, Indonesian, or Indian.

 

No, the problem was not blachen. It was boredom. 

 

Alex had recovered from his injuries, retired gracefully from the battlefield, and now spent his

days doing housework, yardwork, everyday errands, surfing the Internet, and running up the

phone bill. 

 

Since the threat from the aliens had ended, Alex had renewed his relationship with his step

siblings, Irene, in Connecticut, and Jack, in New Mexico, and had --with the aid of Mulder's

typically dead-on, if quirky, deductions-- found his brother Victor, in Toronto, after a thirty-six

year separation. 

 

Alex's life was as normal --as perfect-- as he had ever wished it to be on long, lonely nights under

direr circumstances, but he simply didn't know what to do with himself. He had more money than

he could spend in three lifetimes, so the need to accommodate himself to a regular, nine to five

job held no appeal.

 

Walter had suggested he get a hobby.

 

Thus began a gamut of Tai Chi, photography, reading, swimming, karate, running, weight lifting,

target shooting, star-gazing, and bird watching. 

 

After this flurry of serial activities, Alex complained of feeling unfulfilled.

 

Walter suggested he try something new; some skill he hadn't used during his years as a secret

agent. Something that he would enjoy learning. Something that transcended mere survival.

 

Alex pondered long and hard --and took a cooking class.

 

That was when the trouble began.

 

Alex's favorite food of all time was chocolate, so he naturally gravitated to a candy-making class

which products proved such a hit, he graduated to pastries, which caused both Walter and he to

gain fifteen pounds apiece.

 

After Walter bit the bullet and scheduled extra gym so they could lose those unwanted pounds, he

took Alex aside and gently requested that he balance his culinary expertise with a main dish or

three, preferably from one of the less fattening cuisines.

 

So it was that Alex decided if Yan Can Cook Kung Pao Chicken, so should Alex Krycek.

 

An encounter with blachen was inevitable.

 

The first time Alex used blachen, he was totally ignorant of its...'staying power.' It took a month

to rid the kitchen of the smell. Unfortunately, the dish itself had been a taste sensation. 

 

In order to avoid another month gagging on the lingering smell of rotted fish guts wrapped in wet

cardboard, Alex took his wok to the grill on the balcony. 

 

Scent, as any good physicist can tell you, rises. Which is why the couples on the three floors

above them called, respectively, the owner's association, animal control, and the paramedics, for

surely the stench which was causing the pregnant lady on 20 to vomit uncontrollably could have

only sprung from the rotting corpse of some unfortunate vermin that had died in the ventilation

system.

 

When the smell was, instead, tracked to Skinner's condo, he had been given a warning slip by the

chairman of the owner's association. Such inhospitable actions would not go unnoted.

 

Dinner, unfortunately, had been a palate pleasing success.

 

Tempted, like any junkie, to abuse the now 'out-lawed' substance yet again, Alex --in deference

to the delicate condition of his upstairs neighbor, moved his cooking aparatus to the building's

sub-basement garage. 

 

The result: complaints from everyone who parked their car near Walter's assigned parking space

about the lingering stench; Alex's --and dinner's-- surprise dousing from the impressively sensitive

sprinkler system, which had been set off by a sudden grease flare in the wok; a lecture from the

fire department, which had responded to the automatic alarm set off by the activation of said

sprinkler system, about the illegal use of open flames in an area saturated with flammable gases

and floor stains; and yet another warning slip from the owner's association.

 

Dinner had been ruined by the deluge. 

 

Walter had driven his car into utter chaos: fire engines, hoses deployed; flooded parking lot; irate

neighbors; ruined dinner, and a decidedly sopping and out-of-sorts lover.

 

Walter took the elevator up to his 17th floor condo accompanied by his pouting, half-drowned

Rat, who was dragging his cooking apparatus about him like Marley's ghost, the fugitive odor of

frying blachen wafting about them like the remains of run-over skunk.

 

Walter, realizing that his lover needed to vent --in more ways than one-- prompted Alex to

disclose the sordid details of his latest blachen debacle while they soaked, two man Luge-style, in

the bath tub. After he insistently put his exhausted --but odor-free-- lover to bed, he trooped

downstairs, phoned in an order for pizza, and waited for the deliveryman in the livingroom,

staring at the second warning slip like a seer scrying through a crystal ball. 

 

Walter had moved into the Vista Towers condo complex twelve years ago, upon his separation

from his estranged, now late, wife Sharon. Located in Crystal City, a chic, bedroom community

for diplomats and high paid government flacks, six miles from his then place of employment, it

had been a refuge from the turmoil of his personal life, and the professional compromises

demanded by the Consortium and the political machinations of his co-workers.

 

He no longer worked for the F.B.I., having given it up in order to protect his lover from the death

throes of the Consortium. It was no longer convenient to his place of employment. Even after

twelve years of continued habitation, the decorator-furnished livingroom was surprisingly spare of

personal touches, virtually devoid of the imprint of its inhabitants' personalities. Anonymity had

been an easy, non-choice way to avoid facing the void that passed for his life. But impersonality 

was no longer the comfort it had been. Now, it was an negation of his attempt to build a future

with Alex. The strict, bland conformity imposed upon his life choices by the owner's association

now seemed an imposition upon his emerging individuality.

 

The pizza came. 

 

Walter paid for it, then carted it upstairs with a couple bottles of beer. He settled himself into the

bed, snuggling next to his now dry and pleasantly toasty-warm lover, and interchanged bites of

pizza with slugs of beer and spicy kisses.

 

When the last bite of crust had been sopped with the dregs of beer, and the cardboard container

crushed into the bedside waste bin, Walter told Alex to clear his schedule. It was time to give up

this no longer useful, temporary refuge for a new haven where two, no-longer desperate men

could forge a new life together. Somewhere where the smell of blachen could hover over them

like a little black cloud without out-raging the neighbors, while the taste of blachen could enliven

and fulfill the men who dared to eat it.

 

SAMBAL UDANG

 

Sambal is a multi-purpose condiment used throughout Indonisia, Malaysia and southern India.

There are as many types as spaghetti sauce recipes, but the most basic version is a mixture of

chile, brown sugar, and salt. This version is Malaysian and uses shrimp and blachen, which is a

paste made from shrimp and salt.

 

1/2 lb medium-sized prawns, shelled, with tails intact.

1 cup coconut milk

3 tbs peanut or coconut oil (or 2 tbls of one of these oils and 1 tbs sesame oil, for added flavor)

1 two inch piece of lemon grass

4 Thai bird chiles, seeded (you can substitute serrano peppers) 

4 dried red chiles

8 small onions

1 and « ounce blachen

1 handful of skinned, roasted peanuts chopped

 

Pound together the thai bird and dried red chile peppers, onions, and blachen in a mortar.

Heat the oil in a frying pan or wok with the lemon grass stalk.

Add the pounded ingredients, and peanuts fry until fragrant.

Lower heat.

Add coconut milk. 

Boil. Reduce the sauce to desired thickness. 

Discard lemon grass.

Add prawns and stir till cooked. Don't overcook the shrimp.

 

Set aside in a bowl.

 

GARLIC FRIED NOODLES

1 pound cooked cellophane (mung bean) or rice noodles, flat, a little broader than fettucinni

(follow package directions for preparing)

3 tbs oil (as above)

1 bunch scallions, finely sliced

1 bunch corriander (cilantro) or parsley, chopped

2 thumbs fresh ginger, grated

2 limes, juiced

1 tbs soy sauce

1 lb spinach sliced

3 to 12 cloves garlic, minced

salt and fresh ground black pepper to taste

 

Heat oil in frying pan or wok, add garlic until toasted brown, about two minutes. 

Add scallions, ginger, soy sauce, and lime juice.

Stir for 20 to 30 seconds.

Add the noodles, corriander, and spinach.

Cook until the spinach wilts.

Add the Sambal Udang. Toss.

Season with salt and freshly ground pepper.

 

Serves 4


End file.
